We moved into a brand new neighborhood last November. And by brand new I mean it went from raw land to roads and houses! Because of that, it took awhile for birds to visit my yard. But at least now I have Towhees, Jays and Juncos.

Another new neighborhood issue is bees. There aren’t any. I have plenty of flowers around the yard, but I guess it will take awhile to get them to come and to pollinate my veggies I have growing. In particular my yellow squash, zucchini and cantaloupe.

In doing research online and discussing with my green thumb son, I learned about the flower differences between male and female. The squash and zucchini are easy. This is a female flower, obviously, with a successful pollinated zucc!

This is the male; just a long straight stem and flower. (And, I see a very tiny female that I need to pollinate as soon as the flower opens!!)

I was able to successfully pollinate my first squash, YUM!

The cantaloupe was another, much tougher issue. I kept seeing these flowers and going, is this a male, a female? what? These were the only kind I saw. Is there so little difference that I cannot see?

Nope! Turns out, these are all male flowers. Yesterday, I discovered what a female flower actually looks like and it does have that little fruit at the end, just like the squash does, but ever so tiny!! Plus, there are no long stems on the male flowers, making it harder to distinguish.

Yay, finally! I pollinated that one as well, so we’ll see if it takes.

Every morning, when I walk thru my garden, I do an inspection for more flowers….until I see bees taking over my job 🙂